No prospect for president scares me -- until he or she gets a rubber stamp from Congress.
Rubber stamps gave us the Iraqi War first and then Obamacare. Democrats will be offended by the comparison, but I'm making a bipartisan point. Left unchecked, either party acts as if what it wants is what the country needs.
So my heart sank Thursday while reading the rationalization that counted for an endorsement by speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc. He said: Don't worry. The GOP-controlled U.S. House will write the laws. All President Donald Trump will have to do is sign them.
Ryan's statement borders on tragicomic. Trump won the GOP nomination by rebelling against his party's ruling order. If he wins the presidency, it will be by running against Washington. Yet Ryan says everything's OK, the Republican establishment is still in charge. No, it's not. Ryan can't even control his House thanks to about 40 radicals, each of whom wants to be Donald Trump when he grows up.
I wish Ryan had simply said, "Hillary Clinton would be worse." Instead, he said policy papers and details would start coming out next week -- that he would do his party's presidential nominee's homework for him. Therefore, Ryan as much as declared the nominee unfit to shape his own administration's policy, but he'll vote for him anyway. This is surrender.
If Trump is elected, there won't be any checks and balances -- not at first. The GOP has a iron grip on the House majority. Trump has a iron grip on the GOP. He defeated 16 nationally prominent Republicans to get there. The sheer speed with which Republicans lined up behind a man many of them openly despised three months ago is sobering.
"A party whose leading factions often seemed incapable of budging from 1980s-era dogma suddenly caved completely to a candidate who regards much of the conservative vision with indifference bordering on contempt." That's the way columnist Ross Douthat put it in the New York Times on May 12.
People are so sick of paralyzed government, perhaps they'd consider anything to be better than four more years of partisan standoff. So maybe they'll go ahead and vote for Trump unleashed. I don't know yet. Neither do several million voters, the politically non-obsessed. They have real lives and aren't looking forward to November. They will decide a race matching up the two most deeply unpopular candidates for president in this nation's history.
So which one should they pick? Well, when you think either one's bad, the question becomes: Who would pose the least risk? If that's the question, then the answer is: The one who can be checked, balanced and perhaps even stonewalled. The lesser of two evils is always the one kept on the best leash.
If that's the argument, then Republican control of the House -- and quite possibly of the Senate, too, or a very close minority at worst -- makes a better argument for voting for Clinton than Trump.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas -- Mr. Stonewall himself -- wants to run for president again. He won't even consider pulling the kind of antics that shut down the government when there's a Republican in the White House. But he'd lead a rebellion every week against Clinton.
The next president will fill vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court. That's true -- but the president's pick requires Senate confirmation. What happened to Robert Bork can happen to a liberal.
A whole lot of Republicans don't see things that way. They think President Obama is an out-of-control dictator and Clinton would be worse. Even I think Obama's "waters of the United States" approach on the environment, his drone assassinations, domestic spying and war-making powers are all out of control. But the courts do sometimes declare limits to presidential powers. They are reining him in on some of his air and water regulations, for instance. His immigration policy is before the U.S. Supreme Court now. There are some boundaries -- as long as the president respects the courts, the check and balance of last resort.
No harsher critic of former President George W. Bush ever worked in the Arkansas media than me. Yet even I respect Bush as a patriotic man with religious faith and a moral compass. As tragically wrong as he proved to be, I never doubted that Bush kept what he believed to be our country's best interest at heart.
And a free ride from a GOP-majority Congress proved disastrous for him.
Commentary on 06/04/2016